Category: VRC

A great example of Digital Humanities at work, the website “What Jane Saw” digitally re-creates a retrospective exhibit of works by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) visited by Jane Austen in 1813. In addition to an interesting visual interface, the site includes a catalog of works in the exhibit, as well as a floor plan, a video recreation using SketchUp, and a bibliography.

As the site’s authors explain, “No visual record of this show is known to have survived, although it attracted hundreds of daily visitors during its much-publicized three-month run. However, many details of the exhibit can be reconstructed from the original 1813 “Catalogue of Pictures,” a one-shilling pamphlet purchased by visitors as a guide through the three large rooms where hung 141 paintings by Reynolds. Armed with surviving copies of this pamphlet, narrative accounts in nineteenth-century newspapers and books, and precise architectural measurements of the British Institution’s exhibit space, this website reconstructs the Reynolds show as Jane Austen (as well as any Jane Doe) saw it.”

Once again, the Chicago Architecture Foundation is providing access to over 200 buildings this weekend!

In addition to tours, there are concerts and family programs, and workshops including one on architecture photography. For more information, check out their website. You can also follow on social media using the hashtag #OHC2015

Consisting of literally thousands of films, videos, sound files, and digitized papers, UbuWeb is a treasure trove of multi-media art. The material is presented freely for noncommercial, educational use. It is easily searchable, often has a short description, and is continually updated.

Two years ago, Artstor acquired an enormous collection of photographs taken by D. James Dee. The archive comprises slides, transparencies, and photographs of hundreds of thousands of artworks and art exhibits photographed by Dee in New York City from early 1970s to 2013. To assist with the cataloging of these images, Artstor Labs has developed a crowd-sourcing “game” called Artstor Arcades, hoping to identify and catalog the images for inclusion in the Artstor database.

According to the site, Arcades “offers a simple gaming platform that allows users to enter terms for a selection of key fields to help identify individual works, including Title, Artist, Date, and Gallery. Users are given points for each field of data entered and can progressively level up through prestigious titles, ranging from “flâneur” to “master.” You receive more points if an artist name, title, or other term matches a previous response. This matching is the key to crowdsourcing data—the more users, the more matches, the better the data.”

Europeana, the site that hosts millions of digital images from European museums, libraries, and archives, now has a Pinterest page.

As can be seen from the image above, the images have been organized into categories and themes. This makes it much easier to find specific items, like Meissen porcelain or maps, or to search across media for a theme or style, like Art Nouveau or Angels. In addition to creating personal boards to “collect” images that might be useful for research or in a presentation, using Pinterest also allows users to discover other images, since users can be taken back to Europeana’s site, which provides basic metadata with links to other works by specific artists or in a specific style, a link to the owning museum, and a suggestion of “other items you may be interested in.”

In December 2014, the French Sculpture Census went live, providing images and information about roughly 7,000 works for French sculpture in American collections. The project is the result of a collaboration between scholars and curators from approximately 280 museums nationwide. The site can be used by both French- and English-speaking audiences and the census can be searched by artist, location, or sculpture. There’s also a very useful list of resources that includes bibliographies, a list of current exhibitions, and a glossary of terms. The creators hope to have approximately 15,000 records by the time the census is finished.

The VRC is excited to announce its new publicly available LUNA collection, Images of Black Chicago: The Robert Sengstacke Photography Archive. Born in Chicago on May 29, 1943, Robert “Bobby” Sengstacke is one of the city’s most prolific documentary photographers who is best known for capturing the African American experience. Having grown up in the newspaper business (he is the grand-nephew of Robert Sengstacke Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender), Sengstacke was able to learn from established African Americanphotographers at a young age and had unique access to important events and people. With the help of Art History Professor Rebecca Zorach, the VRC has scanned over 3,000 negatives featuring the artistic community and street life of Chicago’s South Side in the late 1960’s. To obtain high resolution images and permission contact Robert A. Sengstacke (robert.sengstacke@gmail.com or 773-744-7487).

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is an organization dedicated to preserving the art, archive, and legacy of the American artist Robert Rauschenberg. Considered one of the most important artists of the latter 20th century, Rauschenberg created new forms of art-making, often combining elements of painting, sculpture, photography, and printmaking into his work.
The foundation’s website provides a wealth of information about the artist, including extensive biographical entries, digitized archival material, and hundreds of high-quality images of his work. Additionally, the foundation provides grants, residencies, and artwork for museums and galleries.

Did you know it’s possible to search through Flickr content and add it to your Luna Media Groups and include it in the PowerPoint files you export?

After logging in to Luna, click the Explore menu and then choose External content. You can search by a keyword or a Flickr username. This is especially useful for photographs of architectural sites or popular museum installations.

Hover over the upper right corner of an image to add it to your media group. In order to see data about the image, you’ll have to click the Go To Source link. The quality of data varies widely in Flickr because it depends on what the photographer included.